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Princeton NJ — Growing up in the South, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse was
fascinated by the civil rights movement. But the villains of the stories he
heard — the cross-burning Klansmen and the club-wielding police officers — just
didn’t resonate with him.

Kevin Kruse, who joined the history department faculty in 2000,
has found the suburbs a rich source of fodder for his studies of the political
and social history of 20th-century America and the making of modern
conservatism. (photo by Denise Applewhite)

“I never recognized the white Southerners,” said Kruse, who was
raised in Nashville. “The bulk of white people may have opposed civil rights,
but not all of them opposed it in such a bloody and brutal way. There had to be
more to the story.”

His interest in the topic led him to study segregationists in depth
when he went to Cornell University graduate school, after earning a history
degree from the University of North Carolina. “I was trying to find the people
I knew in a story I knew well, not just the flat two-dimensional racists that
everyone today would recognize as ridiculous.”

Kruse went on to write his dissertation on segregationist
strategies and ideologies in Atlanta. His work grew into a groundbreaking book,
“White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism,” published
last year by Princeton University Press. It describes how segregationists moved
to the suburbs and cast aside their racist demagoguery in favor of a new kind
of separatist philosophy that, Kruse argues, led to the ascendancy of the Republican
Party and a transformation of American politics.

New language of separatism

At first glance, Atlanta might not seem the right place for Kruse’s
study. During the civil rights era, the Georgia capital was known as “the city
too busy to hate.” It was home to Martin Luther King Jr. and a host of other
black leaders. Racial integration in the public sphere — parks, pools, buses
and schools — occurred there without the kind of violence that made other
Southern cities like Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma infamous. This lack of
resistance is often seen as evidence that the segregationists were defeated,
but Kruse insists this was not the case.

Instead of fighting and facing the risk of being labeled as racist,
many whites retreated to the suburbs and “created the Atlanta of which the
city’s segregationists long dreamed,” Kruse writes in his book. A new nickname
was earned: “the city too busy moving to hate.”

Once ensconced in the suburbs, white southern conservatives began
to develop a new language of separatism that stressed their own “individual”
rights: the right to be left alone, the right to do as they wished with their
property, the right to decide where their children went to school.

In the South, many conservative causes — such as the tax revolt,
privatization of public services and tuition vouchers – were first advanced by
those opposed to integration, according to Kruse. “Under the auspices of
segregation, public places were for whites only, and whites thought of them as
their birthright; they had no problem paying taxes to support things like
public parks and public pools,” he said. “When integration came and they were
forced to share these places with African Americans, segregationists became
much more hostile to the idea of using tax money to support public places. In
countless ways like this, they experienced a shift away from the public sphere,
toward privatization, toward lower taxes.”

Kruse’s book is significant because it challenges the common
assumption that the “white flight” seen in Atlanta and elsewhere was little
more than a relocation of whites to the suburbs. He shows how these white
southern separatists spawned a new suburban-based conservative movement that
catapulted to power — with its talk of smaller government, property rights and “quality
of life.”

“On the surface (these) policies appear to have little to do with
the forgotten struggles over segregation,” Kruse writes in “White Flight.”
“Upon closer examination, however, much of the modern suburban conservative
agenda — the secessionist stand towards the cities, the individualistic
outlook, the fervent faith in free enterprise and the hostility to federal
government — was, in fact, first articulated and advanced in the resistance of
southern whites to desegregation.”

Kruse’s book has won praise in the mainstream press — it was a New
Republic holiday pick last year — and from fellow academics. Harvard history
professor Lizabeth Cohen explained why Kruse’s work is so extraordinary. “Most
of the studies of the racial politics of suburbanization have focused on the
North and West,” Cohen said. “Somehow the South is assumed to have always been
a suburbanized and segregated Sunbelt, a notion that Kruse proves to be
completely wrong. Rather in his book, we watch him trace in fascinating detail
just how Atlanta became suburbanized and segregated, neighborhood by
neighborhood, block by block.”

Renowned Southern historian Dan Carter of the University of South
Carolina called “White Flight” a “powerful and compelling” book. “I think his
account of the way in which the politics of race reshaped white middle- and
working-class attitudes towards the ‘public sphere’ (and the taxes necessary to
support it) is one of the most important contributions yet made by historians
to our understanding of the growth of Sunbelt suburbia and the triumph of the
anti-government, anti-tax conservative agenda,” Carter said. “I regard that as
high praise for a young scholar who only received his Ph.D. a few years ago.”

Kruse joined the Princeton faculty in 2000, immediately after
earning his Ph.D. from Cornell. “He just stood out from the crowd,” recalled
Jeremy Adelman, chair of the history department. “From the first time we read
the dissertation, we knew we were dealing with an exceptional historian. And
he’s turned into exactly what we hoped: a bold and pioneering emerging star in
his field.”

Future endeavors

Kruse, who will be promoted to associate professor July 1, has
continued to focus on contemporary politics and urban/suburban history. Two
years ago, he brought together a group of cutting-edge historians to discuss
suburbia in America; these presentations have been collected into “The New
Suburban History,” which was edited by Kruse and Thomas Sugrue of the
University of Pennsylvania and will be published this summer by the University
of Chicago Press. This spring, he organized another conference at Oxford
University called “Mobilizing the Movement: Civil Rights and the Second World
War,” and these papers soon may be published as well.

Kruse also is working on another book, “One Nation Under God: Cold
War Christianity and the Origins of the Religious Right.” It continues his
investigation into the making of modern conservatism. “The argument I’m
exploring is that even though the religious right doesn’t appear on the public
radar until the 1970s, it really developed in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it
comes out of the way in which military industrial suburbs got their livelihoods
from military bases or defense contractors. These suburbs had a real investment
in the Cold War. And they, more than anyone else, adopted the religious
nationalism of the Cold War.”

Kruse pointed out that during this time the words “under God” were
added to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” became the nation’s
motto. “All this came about as a result of this identity crisis that America
had in trying to define itself as being diametrically opposed to the godless
Soviet Union,” he said. “There was this new level of public religiosity, this
sense that the nation could not survive without religion.”

Kruse’s interest in conservatives began at Montgomery Bell Academy
in Nashville, one of the South’s elite private schools, which Kruse, the son of
a homemaker and an accountant, attended on a scholarship.

Once in college, Kruse, who excelled in school, decided he wanted
to be a teacher. At Princeton, he leads an undergraduate lecture course, “The
United States Since 1920”; a documents-intensive course for sophomores,
“Approaches to American History”; a junior seminar; and a number of graduate
seminars.

Kruse said his research has had a big impact on his teaching. “For
the lecture course, I talk about the backlash to the civil rights movement and
the dynamics of urban decline and suburban rise, both of which draw on my
research for ‘White Flight.’” He said his new work has also come up in his
graduate seminars and will be featured this fall in a freshman seminar on the
religious right.

Students give his classes high marks. “Professor Kruse has been the
most influential professor I’ve had in my Princeton career,” said Elizabeth
Harvey, a member of the class of 2006 who majored in the history of science.
“When asking around for junior seminar instructors, almost every person I
talked to told me I had to get into Professor Kruse’s seminar. And it was, by
far, the best course I’ve taken at Princeton. Professor Kruse doesn’t just
force you to engage in the subject matter, he forces you to engage with each
other. He promoted discussion and conversation, rather than individual people
talking directly to the professor.”

Kruse said he is thrilled to be contributing to a department with
such a distinguished tradition. “Coming here is like being drafted by the
Yankees,” he said. “To walk into a department full of legends both past and
present is really humbling.”